SUNS  4366 Wednesday 3 February 1999

Bogota, Feb 1 (IPS/Yadira Ferrer) -- Colombian coffee production could be seriously damaged in the coming three months as a result of the earthquake which struck the centre-eastern region of the country last week.
The earthquake hit 20 municipal areas in the departments of Quindio, Risaralda and the north of the Cauca valley on January 25, and while the crops themselves survived the impact, the consequences will rob the Colombian product of its characteristic smoothness.

For while the plants remained unharmed by the earthquake, infrastructure problems on the coffee estates will cause massive problems, Antonio Herron, technical manager of the National Federation
of Coffee growers (Fedecafe) told IPS.

A preliminary census by Fedecafe - responsible for handling the nation's coffee sector policy - showed the quake had affected 16,153 of the region's 19,345 coffee plantations.

The coffee berries were not damaged by the seismic action as they were still early in the growth period, but the system used to care for the plants, process and store the beans will suffer complications.

Traditional coffee estates have a main house, others for the workers and the "beneficiadero" or processing plant where the coffee bean processing machines and silos are found.

The "beneficiadero" is where the raw red skinned coffee berries are processed into dry coffee beans - the state in which they are sold on to the cooperatives and private exporters who then process them further for consumption or export.

"There are still 90 days until the half-yearly harvest" and the conditions in which the coffee-growing labours are carried out "will affect the quality of the beans," said Herron.

Coffee producer, Mario Estrada, classed damage to production infrastructure as "serious," as the way the beans are washed and dried in the processing plant is fundamental in achieving the smooth quality of Colombian coffee that makes it such a desirable international commodity.

However, many of the roadways used to transport the berries to the processing centres are currently blocked, and this will hold up consignments already planned by at least one or two weeks.

Similarly, as the coffee is hand picked by casual labourers, producers fear workers will be unwilling to come into the area at harvest time for fear of further earthquakes.

In the region affected by the earthquake, known as the Coffee Growing Axis, some 200,000 people are directly reliant on coffee growing and another 800,000 gain their earnings indirectly from this activity.

According to Herron, the estates affected have 95,000 hectares of coffee, representing 13 percent of the 11.3 million sacks collected per year on average.

After the earthquake last Monday - which according to the Red Cross left nearly a thousand dead, 3,492 wounded and 3,500 disappeared - coffee futures rose to $1,755 per ton on the London commodity exchange. However, prices had fallen back to their normal level of 1,600 dollars
by last Wednesday, once it was clear the harvest had not been affected.

According to Jorge Cardenas, Fedecafe director, the most pressing priority for the entity is to try and reassure coffee producers so that they can sell all the remaining harvest and "do everything in our power to maintain stability in foreign and domestic prices."

Fedcafe announced that in the course of this week it will publish an evaluation of the costs of damage to infrastructure caused by the seismic action and its repair, along with the measures needed to help coffee growers to refinance their debts.

According preliminary calculations from the government, the costs of reconstruction in Armenia and Pereira - the two major towns destroyed by the earthquake - and the other 18 settlements hit will be between 300 and $500 million, but other sectors calculate the figure at closer to a billion dollars.

In order to implement the reconstruction plan the government declared an "economic and social emergency" in the coffee-growing zones, giving extraordinary powers to the president to take special tax and budgetary action to deal with the disaster.

Until the early nineties, coffee was the main Colombian export product. But petroleum has now overtaken it, raising two billion dollars in hard currency each year and making up 15% of foreign earnings. The 1999 coffee harvest was expected to top 12.5 million sacks, 40% of which would be from the midyear harvest.